WASHINGTON — Arnold Schwarzenegger is denouncing antisemitism and hate, while urging those who've "stumbled into the wrong direction" to turn around before it's too late.
Schwarzenegger, an Austria native and former governor of California, spoke in a lengthy video posted Monday on his social media accounts about an emotional trip he recently took to the former site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
In the video, Schwarzenegger said he didn't "want to preach to the choir" and instead had a message "to the people out there who might have already stumbled into the wrong direction, into the wrong path."
"When you spend your life looking for scapegoats, you take away your own responsibility. You remove your own power, you steal your own strength. Nobody who has chosen the easy path of hate has gotten to the end of the road and said, 'Oh, what a life.' No. They die as miserably as they lived," Schwarzenegger explained. "No matter how far you've gone, I want you to know that you still have the chance to choose a life of strength. But you have to give up your war against everyone that you hate."
He also spoke personally about his father, who was a Nazi and "fell for a horrible, loser ideology."
Schwarzenegger added that throughout history hate has always been the easy path, but it's the "path of the weak" and breaks all who go down that route.
"The Nazis? Losers. The Confederacy? Losers. The apartheid movement? Losers. And the list goes on and on," Schwarzenegger said.
Schwarzenegger also shared his message on Twitter and asked others to share it as well.
"With hate and anti-semitism on the rise, many of you may know someone who needs to hear this. Do me a favor and share it with them, gently. Remember the goal is getting them to listen, and if it feels like an attack, the listening part of their brain will turn off," he tweeted.